Secret of the Gargoyles (Gargoyle Guardian Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  Oliver stepped onto the quartz and hissed. Beside him, Celeste touched a crystal with a talon and narrowed her eyes.

  “It hurts,” Oliver said. He spoke so softly that I didn’t think he meant for me to hear.

  “You can wait—” My words died in my throat at Oliver’s fierce glower. He must have been learning that look from Marcus.

  “I go where you go,” he said.

  His tone was pure Marcus, too. I glanced to the fire elemental to see if he noticed.

  “Like guardian, like companion,” he said.

  Oliver hissed as each foot hit the crystals for the first time; then he quieted. I didn’t need to test him with magic to know he was in pain; I could see it in the hunch of his shoulders and the droop of his ruff. Clamping my mouth against a protest that would only offend the brave young gargoyle, I waited until Marcus and Celeste caught up before mincing deeper into the baetyl.

  We ducked under a slender rose quartz crystal bar, then climbed over a carnelian crystal a few shades lighter than Oliver and so thick Marcus and I couldn’t have spanned it with linked hands. Marcus kept rigid control over the glowballs, eliminating all but two, so we moved in a tight halo of light. After ten steps, I lost sight of the entrance.

  “Oliver, how’s your night vision?” I asked, wishing I couldn’t hear my apprehension in my voice.

  Marcus shot me a sharp look, then glanced back the way we’d come. He stopped while we waited for Oliver’s response.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you see where we came in?”

  “Yes. You can’t?”

  I let my breath out slowly. “No. What else can you see? Are there any obvious problems?”

  “The roof has caved in,” Celeste said, emerging from the darkness ahead of us.

  “A cave-in? Would that be enough to break a baetyl?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. It’s small.”

  Small or not, it was a place to start. “Lead the way.”

  She hadn’t finished turning around when gargoyles burst from the shadows. They charged from every direction and dive-bombed from above, teeth bared, claws raised, and spikes distended in attack.

  I froze in shock, but Marcus spun into action, drawing his sword in a fluid motion.

  “Get behind me,” he ordered.

  I dodged to the side to avoid being flattened by a stampeding quartz porcupine, and Marcus lurched in the opposite direction when a gargoyle dropped out of the shadows above him. His sword flashed through the air, just missing the gargoyle’s canine tail.

  “Wait! We’re here to help,” I shouted, waving my arms ineffectually.

  A life-size jasper hippopotamus barreled down on me, his wide bat wings slicing through the air like blades. I jumped to the side, leaping across a broad, horizontal amethyst crystal. The hippo pivoted on thick lion legs, clawed paws shoving effortlessly against the jagged floor to follow me.

  “Mika!” Oliver cried.

  The hippo’s jaw unhinged on a silent roar. I screamed and grabbed the elements, but they squirmed from my grasp. Frantic, I rolled under the amethyst crystal, ignoring the sharp cuts and stabs of the baetyl’s crystal floor.

  “Run, Oliver!”

  The hippo fell upon me mouth-first, crushing me between his stone jaws.

  10

  I floated, a spark in pure inky onyx. I couldn’t feel my body. I tried to wriggle a finger or shake my head, but there was only darkness and the rapid pounding of my pulse.

  Was I dead?

  Why would I be dead?

  The massive stone teeth of the hippo flashed across my memory, then all the attacking gargoyles. They’d come out of nowhere, and we hadn’t had a chance to fight back.

  My pulse fluttered faster.

  I opened my eyes.

  I lay in a narrow plaster tunnel. Not just any tunnel. It was the hidden back room of the temple in New Hope where I’d rescued Oliver and his siblings from Walter’s black market auction. How did I get here? I had been in the baetyl . . .

  When I sat up, I saw Oliver. He was tiny, hardly larger than a house cat. I frowned at his small body, trying to pinpoint why my brain insisted his size was wrong. That wasn’t the problem. The cage of elemental magic pinning him to the stone floor was the problem. He was trapped. And injured. His left two feet and wing tip had been burned with acid, leaving jagged patches of raw pain. Oliver’s magic, his life, leaked from the wounds into the cage, strengthening it. His golden-red eyes whirled with agony, but the cage smothered his cries.

  I lurched to my hands and knees, heart pounding. This was exactly how I’d found Oliver when Walter had tortured—

  Walter.

  Walter was in prison.

  Darkness closed in on us, until all I could see was Oliver, trapped and in pain. The baby gargoyle locked eyes with me and his muzzle opened and closed in muted misery. Fingers trembling, I gathered the elements and thrust them into the first quartz anchor, countering the trap. It didn’t matter how this had happened. I’d sort it out later. After I freed—

  Agony pumped through my veins, cording my muscles. Magic leeched from me. I had to free . . . someone. Fear clouded my thoughts and the elements slid from my grasp. The pain abated. Oxygen filled my lungs, flavored with quartz. I sucked in another deep breath, centering my thoughts.

  Myself. I had to free myself. I opened my eyes to a view warped by the elements. Magic wrapped me in a twisting cage, siphoning my life. If I struggled, the pain would return, so I held still and tried to think. I couldn’t remember anything before the pain. How long had I been caged? Who was holding me?

  Walter walked toward me. Once I saw him, I saw the rest of Focal Park spread around us, the dome of blue sky and puffy white clouds above me and the etched-marble pentagram beneath me. I’d been positioned in the center and seed crystals locked the elements in place at all five points. My head went light on my shoulders. Stuck in the center, I’d be the focal point of the spell, my life drained to feed whoever controlled the pentagram. I needed to escape or I’d be killed.

  I gathered magic, gritting my teeth against the rush of pain, but no matter how hard I clung to the elements, they kept slipping from my control. Walter smiled. He used brushes of air to shove the crystals holding the net closer around me, tightening the magical cage until I couldn’t move.

  “Good.” Elsa stepped up beside Walter. The inventor looked as insane as the day she’d unleashed her gargoyle-enhancement replication invention upon Focal Park. I panted against the elemental restraints, tasting quartz in each breath.

  Walter hadn’t been at Focal Park, and I hadn’t been alone—

  Silver cracks split the air around Elsa like lines of tinsel opening into nothing but silver light.

  Elsa leaned close, breathing on my face, pulling my attention back to her feverish eyes. “This will change everything.”

  I strained to move, but my body wouldn’t respond. Elsa wove a spear of wood tempered with water and drilled into my neck. Pain like fire erupted from my throat and seared across my brain in white-hot agony. I screamed inside my head, but no sound escaped my frozen lips.

  I could feel the hole in my neck.

  A hole in my neck.

  I should be dead. I couldn’t survive a hole in my neck.

  I wasn’t made of stone . . .

  Silver cracks fractured the air around the inventor as she readied her next wood and water attack. I tried to study the fissures, but Elsa filled my vision. She plunged her barbaric elemental weave into me again. Scorching pain burned through my brain, but I clung to my last thought. It was important. I wasn’t made of stone. I wasn’t made of stone.

  I wasn’t a gargoyle. I could fight back.

  I grabbed for the elements. Like grains of sand, they trickled through my grasping mental fist. All but earth.

  I refined earth to pure quartz, and the magic solidified in my grip. Elsa loomed, another wood and water spear poised to stab me. The silver lines around her faded. My instincts demanded I
defend myself. I could block her, shatter that damn magic spear before it hit my stone—

  I wasn’t made of stone.

  The silver lines burst back into existence, and with a soundless roar, I drove the quartz into the shimmering fractures with every ounce of my strength.

  Focal Park, Elsa, the trap—it all shattered. My magic hurled through the baetyl, burrowing into an amethyst cluster five feet away. The crystals shattered and reshaped, falling to the baetyl floor in perfect amethyst snowflakes.

  “Mika?”

  Oliver loomed in my vision, his head as large as mine, his body the appropriate size. I grabbed him and wrapped my arms around his smooth ruff. He whuffled my face with soft, relieved breaths. When I let him go, he pulled back far enough for me to see Celeste. Light fractured across the crystals around her, defining her dark outline more than illuminating her.

  “She is herself?” Celeste asked Oliver.

  “I am me,” I said, taking comfort from the simple statement. I looked for the source of the light, surprised to see it coming from the crystals. When had they started glowing?

  “What happened?” Oliver demanded. “You were fine; then you were both screaming and collapsed.”

  “Where’s Marcus?” I sat up, hissing when the movement woke the pain in a dozen cuts on my arms and hands. Marcus lay a dozen feet away, sprawled on his back across a bushel of mint-green prasiolite crystals. His head lolled off the edge of a sturdy crystal and his hands and feet twitched, but the light underneath him left his face shadowed.

  I staggered across the crystal floor to him, Oliver so close to my side that I had to grab his wings to prevent myself from being knocked down.

  “Marcus.” His eyes moved behind his eyelids, and he mouthed mumbled words. I prodded his arm, and when he didn’t respond, I added more force to the next poke. He twitched and moaned but didn’t wake. His sword protruded from the baetyl wall a few feet away; he’d managed to wedge the tip of it between two crystals. The scabbard was still strapped to his back, but his fall had broken the rigid bamboo, and splinters of it dusted the crystals below him.

  “He’s trapped in the nightmare.” I reached for magic—maybe a jolt to his senses would wake him—but it was as if I were in the nightmare again. The elements slid from my grasp, all but earth. Its jagged edges vibrated against my skull until I tuned it to quartz; then the element stabilized and smoothed out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything with quartz to wake Marcus. Growing alarmed, I lightly slapped his cheek. He swung a halfhearted punch without opening his eyes. I danced out of reach. “Marcus, wake up!”

  “What nightmare?” Oliver asked.

  As if his confusion summoned them, gargoyles seethed from the baetyl’s geode-like walls. They swarmed over the crystals and rushed us. An enormous green aventurine bear with delicate dragonfly wings led the charge, a half ton of rock galloping on clawed feet to demolish me. I widened my stance and threw a quartz shield around Marcus, Oliver, Celeste, and myself, bracing myself for impact.

  “What are you doing? Mika, what do you see?” Oliver stood on his hind legs, flaring his wings for balance, and squinted in the direction of the charging bear.

  My legs trembled. If not for Marcus, I would have run, but I couldn’t abandon him and I couldn’t carry him.

  The bear skidded to a stop just beyond my shield and reared up on her hind legs, releasing a soundless roar. I frowned. A mute gargoyle? My brain tried to make sense of it but was too distracted by her massive paws. They were larger than my head and tipped with finger-length claws; with one blow, she could kill me, yet she only waved her paws in front of her as if testing the air.

  If she had been a real bear, I would have been scrambling for Marcus’s sword and making as much noise as possible to drive her off. But she was a gargoyle, a reasoning creature.

  “I’m here to help,” I said.

  She shook her head, denying my words.

  “Who are you talking to?” Celeste asked. The gryphon perched on a wide tigereye crystal behind me, her sharp eyes scouring the shadowy baetyl.

  “Her.”

  “Who?” Oliver asked, squinting at the massive gargoyle.

  “You don’t see her?” Frowning, I flicked my glance to Oliver and back to the bear. She hadn’t moved, and next to Oliver she looked . . . less. Less substantial. Weak.

  “See who?”

  “The bear? The other gargoyles?” Only there weren’t other gargoyles now, just the bear, Oliver, and Celeste.

  “I don’t see anything,” Oliver said.

  Confusion muffled my fear, helping me pick out details I’d overlooked in my panic—like the fact that I could see the geometric shapes of the baetyl through the bear gargoyle. Her paws also made no sound on the crystals—none of the gargoyles’ feet had. Frowning, I settled back on my heels, relaxing enough to unclench my fists, but I didn’t lower the shield.

  The bear dropped to all fours, nose snuffling the air around my shield; then she turned and faded from sight. Trapped air gusted from my lungs. I dropped my shield without releasing my grasp of quartz magic and rubbed my hands together, wincing when I roughed up cuts on my palms.

  “It was an apparition,” I said. I explained the gargoyles pouring out of the baetyl and the hippo swallowing me and sending me into a nightmare. I didn’t describe the nightmare.

  “I think Marcus is trapped in a nightmare, too. I got out by using quartz magic.” If that was the only key to escaping the trap, Marcus wasn’t going to wake from his nightmare any time soon. He was a big, bad FPD fire elemental. He had oodles of training for all kinds of dangerous situations, but he’d never think to use something as simple as quartz-tuned earth magic to escape whatever madness he was likely seeing right now.

  “The baetyl must be trying to protect itself,” Celeste said. “Humans aren’t meant to be here. If it were whole, you wouldn’t have made it this far. So it’s fighting back the only way it can.”

  “The baetyl is sentient?” I glanced around, imagining all the crystals sprouting eyes and watching me. The thought chased a shudder down my spine.

  “It is magic unto itself,” Celeste said with a shrug that whispered the rock feathers of her shoulders together.

  I’d had plenty of time to think about the nature of the baetyl on the way up Reaper’s Ridge. I’d abandoned my earlier hope that it might resemble gargoyle magic on an immense, advanced level. A gargoyle, no matter how enraged or injured, could never create magic storms. The apparitions and nightmares only confirmed it: I was dealing with very foreign, very dangerous magic like no other I’d encountered before. Even if it wasn’t sentient, it had some level of awareness—enough to tell when it had been invaded and to deploy honed defenses.

  I rolled my shoulders against the urge to hunch, as if I could hide myself by making myself smaller.

  “Why didn’t it attack me the second time? Why did the bear walk away?”

  “Maybe it recognizes you as a guardian,” Oliver said.

  I doubted it; otherwise it wouldn’t have attacked me in the first place. If I could trust any part of an apparition, I’d say the bear gargoyle had been confused by the shield. Not many humans could manipulate the earth element through only quartz. It’d taken me years of practice to make it feel natural.

  I remembered something Anya, Oliver’s sister, had told me when we first met. She’d said my magic smelled like a gargoyle. Could holding a quartz shield have been enough to confuse the baetyl into thinking I might be a gargoyle?

  “Do I . . . Does my magic smell like a gargoyle?” I asked, half afraid the question would offend my companions.

  Oliver shrugged. “You are a guardian.”

  I looked askance at Celeste. She padded closer and pressed her beak to my chest, inhaling deeply.

  “Your magic smells like a healer, but there are notes of a baetyl in it.” She backed away, eyeing me with fresh wonder. “My sense of smell is not good, otherwise . . . I waited so long out of fear . . .”

 
When I interpreted her wondrous expression, a zing of shock jolted through me. Up until this moment, she hadn’t fully believed I was a guardian, but there was no mistaking the certitude in her eyes now. Celeste rolled her shoulders and fluffed her feathers, and when she settled, she looked as if someone had lifted a heavy load from her back.

  Oliver saw the change in her and smiled smugly.

  “Your magic is a bit like a baetyl’s and it’s what makes you a guardian,” Oliver said. “Or maybe because you’re a guardian, it’s why your magic smells so good.”

  “Just mine? Not Marcus’s?”

  “Just you, Mika. Only you.”

  A seed of hope sprouted in my chest, nurtured by the thought that maybe, just maybe, having magic even remotely similar to the baetyl would enable me to fix it.

  I took a deep breath, tasting the quartz air as I watched Marcus’s hands clench into fists and feebly box at nothing. He looked helpless and vulnerable. Even his scowl was weak. No amount of prodding had stirred him, either.

  “The baetyl’s not going to let me help Marcus until we fix it, is it?”

  Celeste shrugged. “He might be beyond help. But Rourke is not, and we are wasting time.”

  My stomach twisted. She was right, but it didn’t make her words more palatable.

  Celeste and Oliver helped me move Marcus, shifting him until he lay as flat as possible on the bed of sharp crystals. His leather pants and spelled shirt did a much better job protecting him than my clothing had. It was his head I was worried most about. I didn’t have a spare piece of cloth to put between him and the bladelike tips of the crystals, so I removed one of his leather boots and used the leg of it to cushion his head. He might get some cuts on his exposed foot, since I doubted his socks were spelled, too, but it was a fair trade-off.

  I tried folding his arms over his stomach, but he flailed and fought me, smacking his hands into the crystals around us. I gave up and backed away, and he calmed. Blood oozed from nicks and cuts on his hands and wrists, and I let them bleed. If I knew more about healing people and could grasp more elements than quartz, I would have healed him, but quartz wasn’t going to do him any good.